Revisiting Flanders & Swann's song about House & Garden, as they are awarded a blue plaque

The music-hall team Flanders and Swann included a song about House & Garden in their album "At the Drop of a Hat", which we're delighted to revisit now that an English Heritage blue plaque has been put up to commemorate their residence in Kensington in the 1950s and 60s.

One of the great draws of walking around London is spotting the blue plaques high on the walls of houses, telling us which famous people lived there and when. Yesterday the city got a brand new one in memory of 1950s music-hall duo Flanders & Swann, who are rather close to our hearts here at House & Garden thanks to one in particular of their comic songs, "Design for Living", or as the refrain goes, "We're terribly House & Garden".

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From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who had been at school and at Oxford together, performed their revues featuring comedic monologues and songs in theatres around London and the country. Highlights from their repertoire include "A Transport of Delight" on the subject of London buses, "The Gasman Cometh", which deals with the tendency of tradesmen to finish jobs by creating jobs for more tradesmen to do, and "Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers" on the juvenility of swearing among the intelligentsia.

Courtesy of English Heritage

The blue plaque was unveiled at 1 Scarsdale Villas in Kensington, where the pair had a garden studio in which they composed many of their most famous songs and skits in the 1950s. The blue plaque scheme has been commemorating the residences of interesting Londoners since the 1860s, and has been in the hands of English Heritage since 1986. New plaques have to be nominated by members of the public–find out how you can propose your favourite Londoner here.